Commenting on the story: ‘Nothing to offer’: Moonta locals concerned over pubs with no food

Drove through Moonta on way to Minlaton two weeks ago. There was little opportunity to buy a meal. At Minlaton the only pub has meals from Wednesday onwards. We were leaving Wednesday, so that was a third meal we could not purchase on consecutive days. Thankfully we got a nice lunch at the Marion Bay Hotel. These smaller towns are going to struggle with attracting tourists if meal opportunities continue to shrink. – Kevin Prideaux 

What a waste of the tourist dollar in its peak season. We have been holidaying at Moonta for over 30 years. We’ve always had lovely meals from all of the hotels there and tried to support the locals while we are there. This will/has had a huge impact on the local area financially for all of those locals who have/will lose jobs, not to mention a high tourist area where there is nothing to eat. It would be nice to hear from Black Rhino about what the long-term goal is for the hotels and what benefit it will be for the locals. From a hungry long- term tourist! – Valda Rohde

Commenting on the story: ‘Guilty until proven innocent’: Call to reform foster carer investigations

My experience is that Serious Care Concerns can include substantial amounts of the investigator’s opinion that does not need to be corroborated with evidence. The opinion of the investigator is read by social workers as facts. There is no avenue for external review with the department and the investigator’s opinion.

Page 321 and 332 of the Nyland Report details some of the deficiencies of the Serious Care Concern Investigations, but the Department have not offered carers a way to have Serious Care Concerns subject to these deficiencies reviewed. The purported findings influence Working with Children checks with one carer known to me being denied a working with children check based on ambiguous and unfocused narratives within the serious investigation report.

This includes a finding of ‘Deficiency in the quality of Care’ being substantiated for uploading images of guardianship children to the internet that does not consider that the photos were not publicly viewable, did not identity the full names of the children, nor did the photos identify the children as guardian of the minister children, all of which would meet the department’s ambiguous policy on social media use by carers.

The experience by this carer has resulted in them being dismissed in their voluntary role working with children and youth, along with a decades-long effort to have the department correct misleading and inaccurate information contained in the Serious Care Concern costing the carer close to $100k in lawyer’s costs. And this cost is simply to seek justice where department records reflect the truth. – Gavin McAloney